ROBERT EGGERS’ WILD, MAD, BRUTAL VIKING EPIC THE NORTHMAN IS THE DIRECTOR’S BIGGEST, MOST AMBITIOUS FILM YET. AND, AS EMPIRE DISCOVERS, SOME OF THE BLOOD, SWEAT AND TEARS WERE FOR REAL

WORDS ALEX GODFREY

THERE’S A SHOT in The Northman that says everything you need to know about the film.

Alexander Skarsgård, topless and ripped, axe in hand and wearing a wolf ’s head for a helmet, squats down with similar Viking berserkers, about to pillage a village. From up high, a spear hurtles towards them; Skarsgård springs up, grabs it in mid-air, spins around and throws it right back, killing the sap who sent it. This is a huge, violent, bonkers movie. And, because it’s a Robert Eggers joint, heavily steeped in research.

That “fight move”, Eggers tells Empire, comes directly from one of the Old Icelandic sagas, hulking historical opuses from around the 12th century. Those Vikings, they loved set-pieces.

And, it turns out, one-liners. “The sagas can sometimes read like ’80s action movies,” says Eggers. “There’s this scene in Njáls Saga where this dude Skarphéðinn slides across the ice, whacks some guy in the head [with an axe] and his teeth spill out all over the place, and he says something like, ‘That’s what I call a headache.’”

The director of The Witch and The Lighthouse was wary of how this all might look on screen. At one point, he says, his Icelandic co-writer Sjón wrote a sequence “that felt over-the-top to me. I said, ‘You know in The Two Towers when Orlando Bloom takes the shield and rides it like a skateboard down the stairs? I don’t want to go that far.’ And Sjón said, ‘I totally agree with you… but the Old Ones would have loved that scene.’”

This is what Eggers grappled with on The Northman. How big is too big? Could he upscale so substantially without losing what it is that makes him him? His previous films were small, contained affairs. The Northman is a sprawling behemoth, with big studio money (a reported $60 million budget). Shot in Northern Ireland and Iceland, it’s a classical Viking drama, drawing from those old Icelandic sagas, with scope to match.

Ethan Hawke, who plays King Aurvandil, was excited to get a call from Eggers, because he was “flat-out floored by The Lighthouse. And this one is reaching for so much. It’s like he found an ancient Viking scroll in the bottom of a treasure chest lost in a cave off the coast of Norway or something,” he laughs. “It’s an amazing text. I’ve often complained, ‘How come nobody even tries to make Apocalypse Now anymore?’”